CURRENT WISDOM

...We are witnessing today a coupling of ideology and theology that threatens our ability to meet the growing ecological crisis...

...Oh, beauteous language...

...If you come across published non-sense worthy of submission for this page send it on to us at "Department of Current Wisdom," and if we agree and entomb it on this page we shall send you an AmSpec desk calendar, printed in New Orleans, Louisiana, in an authentic women-owned, union print shop...

...They don't stand for election like we do, which is scaly...

...It's the only check and balance on these people...

...They're in for life...

...Or do we seek instead a smooth operator, cozy with the powerful, who purveys information and does not burn to tell it like it is before others get there to sanitize the story...

...This has been happening to me frequently of late as one story after another drives home the fact that the delusional is no longer marginal but has come in from the fringe to influence the seats of power...

...We did not want to say what we both knew: that it was time...

...TANYA SUSAN KOSHY Wellesley College, Class of 2005 (March 10, 2005) Once again courtesy of Mr...

...There are So Many More Important Things happening in the world, the lecture goes...

...VANDEN HEUVEL...

...901 Arlington, VA 22209 Washington Post Of Michael Jackson, Shakespeare, Proust, and the Athens that was East Africa, from the dithyrambic a, ratus of Eugene Robinson, the venerable Post's newest columnist: Please, no lectures about what an immoral waste of time it is to pay even passing attention to the Jackson trial, This is a popular harangue in wonkfilled Washington, where anything or anyone without an acronym is automatically suspect...

...Don't you think so...

...Point the camera like a gun, fire questions and respect no treaty of convenience...

...March 29, 2005) New York Times Columnist Maureen Dowd gets serious about winning yet another Pulitzer for commentary and possibly a Darwin Award: Arabs put their women in veils...

...Frank Ferguson, our guy on the ground in Blue Boston...

...Brush of Hartford, Connecticut...

...It has been a project over the last few decades...

...That's Dan—for better or for worse...

...The Jackson case is an unfolding yarn, and if we weren't the least bit curious about how it will turn out, we wouldn't be human...

...Barbara Boxer, howling from her soapbox at a MoveOn PAC rally so hysterically that one of our favorite lunatic websites had to reproduce it: "Why would we give lifetime appointments to people who earn up to $200,000 a year, with absolutely a great retirement system, and all the things all Americans wish for, with absolutely no check and balance except that one confirmation vote...

...Nowadays, numbed by unending news images, we can no longer feel Dan's edge...

...I would be-gin with the unrelenting assault on the term liberalism by the right wing...

...March 7, 2005) 72 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2005 C U R R E N T W I S D O M Boston Herald And on the Herald's Letter to the Editor page, one of the enlightened files an indignant rejoinder, once out of the emergency room: As a Wellesley College senior, I found your article offensive on many levels ("Wellesley girls gone wild," March 7...

...This is the second time in two years that preball boozing has marred the wildly popular tradition at the women's college where revelers don anything from shorts and ribbed tank tops to Saran Wrap, corsets and, for the men, drag-queen costumes and tuxedo thongs...

...The most probing question I ever received from the likes of these "bright young people" was, "Is this going to be on the test...

...So we're saying we think you ought to get nine votes over the 51 required...

...So myopic are these people in their "moral" values that the only problem that they see with outlawing premarital sex is "an enforcement problem...

...Neither of us spoke...

...It was a cold, dry day, and I still remember the way all the fallen leaves swished through the streets in great brown piles...

...March 24, 2005) Hartford Courant Don DeCesare, "first vice chair-man of the Connecticut Broad-casters Association," moved to tears on the occasion of Dan Rather's suicide: Never did he appear comfortable in those fancy suits...

...Only, at the scene, in safari jackets or native headgear ("Gunga Dan," we called him) did he seem to know his place...

...We put ours in the stocks...

...The truth is that whether you choose to follow this tawdry episode or not, doing so is no more shameful than reading Shakespeare or Proust...

...Bill Moyers, fresh from viewing the "delusional" travel from the "marginal" and the `fringe" to his very "seat" from whence he witnesses a lusty "coupling" even as the ecological crisis grows...

...March 13, 2005) Provided by the esteemed Mr...

...Et tu, Wonkelte...

...Such is the superficiality of this "movement" that people are judged on the quality of their possessions rather than on the quality of their thought...

...I've even heard it from the snarkiest Internet blogger in town...

...March 16, 2005) Boston Herald The prospects for Alcoholics Anonymous among Wellesley's most en-lightened students brighten: A "creative black tie" evening at the annual Dyke Ball at Wellesley College ended in the emergency room or infirmary for 11 party girls who drank the night away Saturday before the school-sanctioned celebration sponsored by a lesbian, bisexual and trans-gender group, school officials and students said...

...Every culture has its own way of tamping down female power, be it sexual, political or financial...

...The American Spectator Dept...

...25] was so strong as to make me physically ill...

...Alcohol-related hospitalizations are unfortunately common occurrences on college campuses, but the Herald chose to highlight this event because of lesbian and bisexual stereotypes—women as wild, independent, intelligent and `trouble...

...What they fail to see in their rejection of the values of the '60s is that the '60s were a reaction necessary to save the country from such unenlightened self-interest run amok...

...March 23, 2005) New York Times Book Review Finally McCarthyism pays off as attested to by the Nation's buxom ediatrix, Katrina vanden Heuvel: Why has "Liberal" become a dirty word to so many Americans today...

...March 6, 2005) MoveOn.org The Hon...

...On the other side, there are so many who would bilk us, rob us, deceive us, kill us, change us...

...Shouldn't we prefer that he be like us: relentless, sometimes selfish, impetuous and even unfair...

...March 6, 2005) BE A SPECTATOR ACTIVIST...

...There ought to be a super vote...

...Certainly never in those silly pullovers on those sterile sets...

...But shouldn't we want an uncompromising, even if flawed, re-porter at the top of the television news profession...

...Ever since the first tribal elder sat around the first campfire somewhere in East Africa and told a story, our species has been transfixed by narrative...

...From the Archives Timeless Tosh From Current Wisdoms Past (May 1985): Washington Post A local Socrates laments the rise of Neo-Babbitry and delineates briefly how a country can be saved by ten years of dope and venereal disease: My reaction to the people portrayed in "Young and Restless on the Right" [Style, Jan...

...RICHARD B. CARTER Washington (January 31,1985) MAY 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 73...

...That isn't too much to ask for such a super important position...

...In their rush for "success," do such people ever stop to probe the social or moral implications of their behavior or the shallowness of their "I'm-out-to-get-mine attitude...

...Afterward, in a gratifying redemption ritual, people like to see the battered women rewarded...

...We drove to the hospital where he had been taken that morning by an ambulance from his nursing home with advanced double pneumonia...

...Americans like to see women who wear the pants be beaten up and humiliated...

...But don't we want him at that wall...

...of Current Wisdom 1611 N. Kent St., Ste...

...C U R R E N T W I S D O M New York Times Poetic introduction to the morning when Papa was kaput: Late last November my sister and I made the decision to let my father die...

...Don't we need him at that wall...

...Please refrain from sensationalizing this story simply because it involves young women who are smart and tolerant of all sexual orientations...

...Oh, passionate Bill: There are times when what we journalists see and intend to write about dispassionately sends a shiver down the spine, shaking us from our neutrality...

...When I taught undergraduates such as these a few years ago, I was appalled by the lack of depth evident in their thought...

...New York Review of Books Pretty prose tapped out by the Rev...